


Still Alive

by chickenmuffinsoup55555



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Nightmares, Post-Finale, but there's tea!, drabble i guess, probably some PTSD, they're just kids and they've been thru a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:08:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28636026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chickenmuffinsoup55555/pseuds/chickenmuffinsoup55555
Summary: “I mean why have you been making tea in the middle of the night?”Sokka took his longest sip of tea yet, letting it burn its way down his throat.  Maybe it was because it was the middle of the night, and the hour and his exhaustion lowered his inhibitions.  But maybe it was because when he looked at Toph, he couldn’t help but remember the feel of her nails digging into the skin on his palms and the terror knowing that he couldn’t hold on much longer.  “Nightmares,” he admitted, his voice sounding hoarser than it did a minute ago.
Relationships: Toph Beifong & Sokka
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	Still Alive

**Author's Note:**

> TW in the end notes

“What are you doing?”

Sokka jumped and nearly dropped the teacup he was holding. He juggled it from hand to hand and finally caught it less than a foot from the floor. He let out a barely audible sigh of relief before turning to face Toph. He was pretty sure the old man wouldn’t be mad at him if he broke one of his (many) teacups, but Zuko would probably get pissy about it, and Sokka didn’t want to spend their last few days together like that. Zuko had been working non-stop on paperwork and meetings with Earth kingdom officials, but he couldn’t put off his return to the Fire Nation forever. There was so much work he had to do in his homeland and leaving the Fire Nation to its own devices much longer…well, they had a whole hundred years of warfare to prove why that was a bad idea.

So Zuko and Mai would be leaving soon, and Aang had already said it was his sworn duty as Avatar to help with the reconstruction efforts. And if the way he and Katara had been glued to each other’s sides was any indication, Katara would be going with him. And it was only a matter of time before Suki and Ty Lee would be rejoining the Kyoshi Warriors on Kyoshi Island. 

Sokka didn’t know where he fit. He didn’t have a country to run or a group to lead. Not anymore, at least. Part of him wanted to stay in the Earth Kingdom with Toph and Iroh, painfully desperate for some sort of stability. Part of him just wanted to go home, stay with his dad and the other Water Tribe warriors like he’d wanted since he was nine years old. Part of him wanted to follow around Suki forever, even if she never left Kyoshi Island again. And the part of him that was still terrified down to his bones to let his sister out of his sight wanted to hop on Appa with Aang and Katara and keep living more or less the same life he’d been living the past year.

“What am  _ I  _ doing?” Sokka said, taking pains to set the teacup down as gently as possible, “What are  _ you  _ doing? It’s the middle of the night.”

“I know that. Were you making tea? Since when did you drink tea?”

“Since…” Sokka shrugged. Then, realizing what he did, said, “I don’t know. Since a few days ago, I guess.” He turned back to the table he’d been making tea on to start heating up the water. He could hear Toph behind him dragging a chair out and sitting down.

“Since Sozin’s comet.”

Sokka’s movements slowed. It wasn’t a question, but Toph’s voice was quiet and almost scared in a way that was deeply uncharacteristic of her. He grabbed a second teacup. 

“Here,” Sokka said, after the couple minutes of silence it took him to finish brewing the tea. “For you.” He set the cup on the table, making sure to let it clink lightly.

Toph picked it up and brought it to her lips.

“It’s hot.”

“I know,” she said, and, probably out of spite, took a sip anyway. They sat together in a semi-comfortable silence. Sokka intermittently blew on then took tentative sips of his tea, each time deeming it too hot, while Toph continued taking overly large sips.

“How many times have you done this?” Toph asked, setting down her empty teacup.

Sokka stared into the honey brown of his tea. “How long have we been staying here?” He smiled as he looked up, trying out a feeble sounding laugh. From the look on Toph’s face, it fell just as flat to her ears as it did to his own.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“ _ Why _ ? Why do you think a boomerang is a good weapon?”

“Hey--”

“I  _ mean  _ why have you been making tea in the middle of the night?”

Sokka took his longest sip of tea yet, letting it burn its way down his throat. Maybe it was because it was the middle of the night, and the hour and his exhaustion lowered his inhibitions. But maybe it was because when he looked at Toph, he couldn’t help but remember the feel of her nails digging into the skin on his palms and the terror knowing that he couldn’t hold on much longer. “Nightmares,” he admitted, his voice sounding hoarser than it did a minute ago.

Toph stilled, then lowered her teacup to rest on her knees. There was another beat of silence that felt excruciating to Sokka before she said, “About what?”

Sokka puffed out a breath. He hadn’t realized, until this moment, how much he wanted—no, _needed_ to talk about them. To just get them out of his head. Maybe if he did that, they’d go away. “About that day,” Sokka finally answered. “The day of Sozin’s comet.” Toph stayed quiet and Sokka could feel her anticipation. With her tacit confirmation that he could keep going, he continued. “Not just that day. But mostly…you and me. On that airship.” Unconsciously, he started rubbing his thumb around the rim of his teacup over and over again. “It never happens the way it happened. The way I _know_ it happened. Sometimes Suki just never comes, and I wake up before we fall. Sometimes…I never _want_ to let you go, but I do anyway. I can’t hold on, or you can’t hold on, and…” His voice went small. He couldn’t look at Toph anymore. “It’s usually only a couple seconds before I wake up, but those seconds…I feel so empty. And even after I wake up, I feel like that. Even though I know you’re still here, and I’m still here, and Suki’s still here.”

“But it still feels so real,” Toph said. Her voice was a little distant and her mostly-empty cup of tea was forgotten. 

Sokka caught himself before nodding mindlessly. “Yeah. And tonight—tonight was bad. Worse.”

“What happened tonight? In your dream?”

Sokka’s thumb stopped moving in circles around his cup’s rim and moved to twist and clench in the fabric of his sleep shorts. He still didn’t look at Toph. “We were on the airship, like always. I was holding onto you, and I wasn’t going to let go. But I knew, somehow, I just  _ knew,  _ that Suki wasn’t coming back. That she was—gone. I knew that our plans have all failed. And I know that Katara is…that Azula’s lightning hits her, instead of Zuko, and my sister is…” He couldn’t force out the words. He changed tracks slightly, trying to force some strength into his wet-sounding voice. “Zuko and Aang I think got confused in my mind. I know they were in different places, but somehow, Ozai, somehow he got them both. All our friends were dead. Our  _ family  _ was dead. Everything fell apart. But not us. We weren’t going to fall. Toph, for  _ once,  _ we weren’t going to fall. But I didn’t want to hang on anymore.”

He paused. He’d gotten this far, he knew he needed to keep going. But that didn’t stop the hot burn of shame festering in his gut. “I didn’t want to hang on anymore, so I let go. Not of you, Toph, I didn’t let go of you, I let go of the platform. I rolled off, and we were both falling, but at least this time, I didn’t let you go.” By now he could taste the salt of his own tears, and was thankful that, at the very least, Toph couldn’t see them. “I gave up. I’m sorry.”

He almost jumped when Toph’s hand landed on his own. She gently unclenched his fist and slid her hand into his, her tiny palm ghosting over fading scars from equally tiny fingernails. The action was so unlike Toph that Sokka couldn’t help but think maybe she too was influenced by the same eerie sense he had, that they were the only two people awake in the whole world. (Even though Sokka knew, intellectually, that wasn’t true; the world was round, so somewhere out there, people were bathed in the heat of the sun. Sokka himself had been partial to moonlight, since, well, since Yue.)

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Toph said. “It didn’t happen. It was just a dream.”

Sokka huffed in a poor imitation of a laugh. He dragged his free hand across his face, wiping away the accumulated moisture. It was so backwards. Toph was the younger of them—just a child—and yet here he was, letting her comfort him after a nightmare. “Yeah,” he said, wanting to push past the sense of failure he felt, for forcing this on Toph, “anyways. Why’re you up?”

Toph pulled her hand back. “The same reason as you, I guess.”

“You had a nightmare?”

“I guess.”

“You guess? What does that mean?” 

“I don’t really remember, okay? Not like you do. I just woke up feeling so…”

Sokka had to restrain himself from pulling Toph into a tight hug. He knew it probably wouldn’t be appreciated, not after Toph had already pulled her hand away. She just looked so small, curled around herself, teacup clutched tightly between her hands. Toph had never seemed scared before (with maybe the exception of anytime her feet weren’t on solid earth); it just didn’t seem right to see her like this. But he was utterly helpless to change it. He didn’t have the right words, and there was no way he could whip up his blustering confidence, not when he’d just told her in excruciating detail exactly how terrified he still was.

“Hey,” he said. “We’re alive, right?” He didn’t have any other comfort to give. “We’re alive.” Sokka really couldn’t believe they were all still alive.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> TW: there's a brief mention of suicide, but it's in a nightmare and super non-graphic. pls let me know if someone feels like I should tag it or something
> 
> link to my [Tumblr](https://chickenmuffinsoup.tumblr.com) if you're interested
> 
> also side note I love sokka's boomerang toph's just giving him a hard time


End file.
